Download or read book Essays on Growth Trade and Producer Heterogeneity written by Alfonso A. Irarrazabal and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Pricing Under Uncertainty and Heterogeneity in the Finance trade growth Nexus written by Seyed Reza Yousefi and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of empirical and theoretical essays on Microeconomic Theory and International Economics. The first chapter discusses the existence and characterization of a model that determines producer's optimal pricing and allocation rule as a preannounced markdown schedule. The mechanism focuses on pricing and operational implications of allotting scarce resources when customers are heterogeneous in their valuations and sensitivities towards availability of product. The proposed mechanism suggests that a carefully designed multistep markdown pricing could achieve optimal revenue when selling a single unit. However, to sell multiple units, monopolist should modify the implementation of markdown pricing by either hiding the number of available products or selling them via contingent contracts and upfront payments. In the second essay, we study the heterogeneity of finance and growth nexus across countries. Our paper contributes to the literature by investigating whether this impact differs across regions and types of economy. Using a rich dataset, cross-section and dynamic panel estimation results suggest that the beneficial effect of financial deepening on economic growth in fact displays measurable heterogeneity; it is generally smaller in oil exporting countries; in certain regions, such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); and in lower-income countries. Further analysis suggests that these differences might be driven by regulatory/supervisory characteristics and related to differing performance on financial access for a given level of depth. The third chapter analyzes contraction of exports in the aftermath of severe financial crises and tests for its heterogeneity across different industries and based on their credit conditions. It provides a theoretical framework to provide insight on why sectors are hit disproportionately during and in the aftermath of severe financial distresses, and confirms most of them with empirical estimations. The findings suggest that industries with greater reliance on outside financing and fewer shares of tangible assets experience greater contractions in export volumes in the years following a severe financial crisis.

Download or read book Essays on Firm Dynamics Endogenous Growth and International Trade written by Cristiana Benedetti Fasil and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent empirical firm level studies reveal the structural heterogeneity of firms in process and product innovation, as well as the central role of product quality in determining world trade patterns and intensities. This calls for a better understanding of the link between firm heterogeneity and the innovation and export decisions of firms which are at the base of productivity growth and, hence, economic growth and development. My dissertation contributes to this debate focusing on the supply side. I propose a novel way to model the production technology of firms by introducing two attributes of firm heterogeneity: cost efficiency and product quality. The goal of the first thesis chapter is to study the effects of process and product innovation on firm dynamics, productivity and endogenous long run growth. In the second chapter an open economy framework with trade between symmetric countries is analyzed. Here the focus is on quantifying the impact of trade as well as trade liberalization on firm innovation dynamics and productivity- and aggregate growth. The third chapter abstracts from endogenous growth and examines the role of the two attributes of firm heterogeneity in shaping the trade patterns and intensities within and across developed and developing countries.

Download or read book Essays on firm heterogeneity and quality in international trade written by Eddy Bekkers and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 2 contains a survey of the three most in‡fluential models on fi…rm heterogeneity and of the most important empirical work on firrm heterogeneity. The chapter starts with a brief review of the homogeneous productivity imperfect competition literature. Chapter 2 …finishes with a comparison of the three most in‡fluential models of fi…rm heterogeneity and the oligopoly model put forward in the thesis. Chapter 3 addresses exporting uncertainty under heterogeneous popularity. Chapter 4 contains the chapter on …firm heterogeneity under oligopoly. Chapter 5 constitutes the models on …firm heterogeneity and endogenous quality. Chapter 6 points out the within-sector specialization model. Chapter 7 addresses the effect of importer characteristics on unit values and the role of markups and quality to explain this effect. Chapter 8 concludes.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Role of Heterogeneity in Industrial Organization International Trade and Environmental Economics written by Xin Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three studies on trade, industrial organization, and environmental economics. The first study investigates endogenous cartel formation with market entry and firm heterogeneity. We show why large firms do not join a cartel in some industries and choose to compete rather than cooperate with a cartel. We illustrate that, under certain conditions, only firms with intermediate productivity benefit from joining a cartel; and low-productive firms cannot compete efficiently for production quota in the cartel and hence choose to stay out. High-productive firms prefer to stay out because building excess capacity in cartel lowers their profits.

Download or read book Three Essays on Firm Heterogeneity and Regional Development written by Hisamitsu Saito and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this dissertation is to theoretically and empirically examine the role of firm heterogeneity in terms of productivity and skill-intensity in the agglomeration process and the effect of agglomeration on regional economic development. In the first essay, I analyze the effect of trade liberalization on agglomeration of high- and low-productivity firms and the consequences for regional economic development. By extending a new-economic-geography model, I find that competition, domestic and international, disperses low-productivity firms to less-developed regions. Trading with advanced countries also appears to bring about dispersion of economic activity. However, attempts by less-developed regions to provide monetary incentives are less likely to attract high-productivity firms. In the second essay, I empirically test the hypothesis that high-productivity (exporting) plants in Chile self-select to locate in large markets. Plants' raw productivity, i.e., productivity independent of agglomeration economies, is computed to obtain regional productivity-distribution measures. I find that high-productivity (exporting) plants indeed locate in a region where other plants in the same industry agglomerate, industrial structure is diversified and market size is large. Finally, plants' self-selection outweighs the contribution of agglomeration economies in increasing a region's productivity. In the third essay, I identify the mechanism by which human-capital spillovers occur at the plant-level and examine the relationship between spillovers and agglomeration of high skill-intensive plants in Chile. I employ plant-level production functions incorporating the absorptive capacity hypothesis, i.e., high skill-intensive plants benefit more from human-capital spillovers than others. Empirically, in 5 out of 8 manufacturing industries, the benefit from spillovers is larger in high skill-intensive plants. Plant entry and exit are also affected by spillovers resulting in regional skill disparities. The results of the three essays reveal locational preferences of various types of firms. Policy options for economic development through increases in regional productivity include specializing in targeted industry, diversifying regional industrial structure, enlarging the market size and workforce education. The results of this dissertation help local governments to evaluate of the benefits from each policy option, which when compared with their knowledge of costs, aid in the selection of an effective policy to improve regional well-being.

Download or read book Three Essays on Trade and Mode of Supply written by Pamela Bombarda and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Firm Heterogeneity and International Trade written by Umut Senalp and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Heterogeneity written by Laurent E. Calvet and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on International Trade and Financial Developmen t written by Faezeh Raei and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter studies the effects of financial obstacles to productivity improvement in the context of trade reforms, by constructing a dynamic heterogeneous firms model with financial frictions. Trade reforms are considered beneficial because they confront the liberalized country's firms with more competition from abroad and increase their incentives to become more efficient. This implies that if poor countries do not improve their productivities they might lose the intended gains from liberalization. Financial frictions however have been quoted an important obstacle for firms to improve their productivities. To address these issues, first, using data on 15 trade liberalization episodes, I document that more financially developed countries experienced more productivity growth after their trade liberalization. Second, I construct a dynamic heterogeneous firms model with financial frictions in financing costs for productivity improvement. Calibrated numerical exercises show that if a country does not improve its financial intermediaries at the outset of trade liberalization it may lose as much as %40 of potential output gains and productivity improvements. The result has policy implications regarding the simultaneous reforms in trade and financial intermediaries. The second chapter is a cross country empirical analysis aiming to provide evidence for the effects of trade openness and financial development on firms decision to upgrade their technology and the impact on the distribution of firm size across countries. The idea is that reduction of trade barriers is likely to affect incentives of bigger firms to grow to export markets as well as incentives of smaller firms to innovate due to increased competition. Financial frictions, however are likely to limit the scope of these decisions and more so for smaller firms and capital intensive industries. This is likely to have heterogeneous effects on firms leading to changes in firm size distribution. I hypothesize that a combination of trade openness and low financial development increases the relative size of big to smaller firms. To test this hypothesis, I take advantage of cross country/industry differences in trade protection and financial development/needs to provide enough variation for identifying these effects. Using establishment level data from OECD countries, I provide evidence for this hypothesis, by performing double difference estimations. In addition using firm level data on 20,000 firms from World Bank's enterprise survey, I provide more evidence that trade openness promotes productivity growth particularly for bigger firms in less financially developed countries. The finding contributes to the literature on importance of finance for firm growth by focusing on the channel of heightened competition due to trade. It highlights the importance of incorporating financial aspects of a country in trade analysis. The third chapter is an exercise exploring the welfare gains of trade in a North-South trade where counties are asymmetric in their ability to produce more sophisticated goods. The exercise is based on the model by Matsuyama (JPE 2000), where the world is a static Ricardian model with a continuum of goods and unit demand non-homothetic preferences. One country (the south) has comparative advantage in production of goods with lower income elasticity of demand. As a result, over time with uniform global improvement in technology in the form of smaller unit labor requirements, the terms of trade moves against south. The numerical exercise, calibrates stochastic interpretation of the model to for a specific choice of countries and provides evidence that over time, if the patterns of specializations are not changed drastically, the country specialized in production of less sophisticated goods disproportionately grows less than the other one and has the terms of trade moving against it.

Download or read book ESSAYS IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT written by Yelena Sheveleva and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays spanning the fields of international trade and economic development. In the first essay, we ask why developing countries fail to specialize in products in which they (at least potentially) have a comparative advantage? For example, farmers in land-poor developing countries overwhelmingly produce staples rather than exotic fruits that command high prices. We propose a simple model of trade and intermediation that shows how holdup resulting from poor contracting environment can produce such an outcome. We use the model to examine which polices can help ameliorate the problem, even when its cause cannot be eliminated.In the second and the third essays, we study how exporters introduce new products into the export market. In the second essay, using information on the universe of Chinese exporters to the US, we document a number of empirircal facts that discipline economists' undrstanding of dynamic aspects of multiproduct exporters. In the third essay, we estimate a structural dynamic model of multiproduct exporting.In Chapter 1, "Wheat or Strawberries? Intermediated Trade with Limited Contracting," we develop the model that provides a new explanation as to why developing countries have agricultural productivity orders of magnitude smaller than in the developing countries. We propose that due to contracting frictions agricultural producers often specialize in staples in which they have a comparative disadvantage, instead of specializing in fruits and vegetables which they can grow efficiently and which command higher prices in the export markets. While farmers can subsits on staples, farmers require services of the intermediaries to deliver cash crops to the export market. When markets are thin intermediaries hold the bulk of the bargaining power and offer a small price to the farmer for his produce. Foreseeing the hold up farmers choose to specialize in the staples.In the model, farmers can produce two types of goods: wheat and strawberries. Wheat is suitable for subsistence but farmers are inefficient in producing it. Farmers are efficient in making strawberries, but cannot subsist on it, and have to sell them to an intermediary who makes profits by selling it at the world price. In a frictionless world farmers would specialize in strawberries. Central to the model is the inability of farmers and traders to contract ex-ante on a price. The absence of enforceable contracts sets the stage for the classic hold up problem and precludes negotiating the terms of trade prior to entry into production. We use a two period model with a continuum of traders and farmers. In the first period, farmers decide whether to produce wheat or strawberries and intermediaries decide whether to enter the business of intermediation. In the second period, farmers and traders meet randomly and trade. Since meetings are random and traders do not know the number of local competitors but do know how thick the market is, they can infer the distribution of potential rivals and offer a price based on this information. In other words, traders compete for the output of farmers in the first price auction. As a result, some farmers fetch a high price for their strawberries; others fetch a low price, or even fail to meet an intermediary. Farmers make the production decision based on the expected price.We solve the model and characterize all the possible equilibria as a function of the primitive parameters. Of particular interest is the region in the parameter space that yields multiple equilibria. In the good equilibrium, specialization occurs according to comparative advantage and there is intermediation, while in the bad equilibrium, there is no intermediation and the staple is produced. Our work suggests that there may be some simple measures to ensure intermediation and specialization according to comparative advantage even if the government is not able to resolve the core issue, the underlying lack of enforceable contracts. A temporary production subsidy or a marketing board that ensures a sufficiently high minimum price to the farmer can help an economy remove the bad equilibrium without intermediation. This paper is closely related to the work of Antras and Costinot (2011). In their paper they focus on the implications of intermediation for globalization in a model that assumes that contracts between traders and producers are enforceable. In contrast we study the implications of contractual failure on production choices in a model of trade with intermediation. In Chapter 2, "Multiproduct Exporters: Empirical Regularities," we use information on Chinese exporters to the US to document a number of empirical regularities regarding dynamic multiproduct exporter behaviour. First, we confirm that scope and firm scale are positively associated. This suggests that more productive firms select to produce more products. Furthermore we find empirical regularities that are consistent with firms facing uncertainty in the export market. We explore the conjecture that firms learn about their potential in new export products trough exporting similar products. We find only tentative support for this conjecture.In chapter 3, "Multiproduct Exporters: Learning versus Knowing," we develop and estimate a structural model of multiproduct exporters based on three empirical regularities documented using data on Chinese exporters. These regularities are as follows: (1) multi-product exporters introduce their best-selling products early; (2) more than 40% of the new products introduced by incumbent exporters are dropped due to low sales within the first year; (3) for a firm, the probability of introducing a new product is positively related to the survival and success of the earlier products.The first regularity is consistent with unobserved firm-product specific heterogeneity. The second suggests that both incumbents and new exporters face uncertainty when they introduce new products. The third is consistent with firms learning about their potential in an export market, i.e., their brand effect, as they introduce new products. We develop a model which incorporates all of these features, and we estimate it structurally using data on Chinese exporters to the U.S. in the plastics industry.First, we find that known demand shocks play an important role in whether producers enter the exporting market or not. Second, we find that it is important to account for large attrition among new exporters including uncertainty about the brand effect. When we let firms know their brand effect precisely, only those with sufficiently high brand effects enter, and then the model cannot replicate disproportionately large attrition of new products among new exporters. Third, we find that while firms act consistently with learning about their brand effect, the uncertainty that firms face in conjunction with introducing new products looms large, and limits the extent to which learning affects incentives of firms to add new products. Our counterfactuals show that the distribution of products among the high brand effect firms only marginally first order stochastically dominates the distribution for low brand effect firms.Using our model we revisit the question of trade policy in the multiproduct firm setting. We simulate a decrease in the cost of introducing new products for firms. Our simulations suggest that in the presence of economies of scope and even moderate learning effects, decreasing costs of introducing subsequent products can make a significant contribution to increasing trade flows.

Download or read book Essays in International Trade Firm Heterogeneity and Gravity Applications written by Sonali Chowdhry and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Economic Growth Institutions and Technology Diffusion written by Diana Maria Van Patten Rivera and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter of this dissertation (joint with Esteban M ndez-Chac n), we study the short- and long-run effects of large firms on economic development. To do so, we use evidence from one of the largest multinationals of the 20th Century: The United Fruit Company (UFCo). The firm was given a large land concession in Costa Rica--one of the so-called "Banana Republics"--from 1889 to 1984. Using administrative census data with census-block geo-references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity (RD) design that exploits a quasi-random assignment of land. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Regions within the UFCo were 26% less likely to be poor in 1973 than nearby counterfactual locations, with only 63% of the gap closing over the following 3 decades. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities that likely account for our result. We then build a dynamic spatial model in which a firm's labor market power within a region depends on how mobile workers are across locations and run counterfactual exercises. The model is consistent with observable spatial frictions and the RD estimates, and shows that the firm increases aggregate welfare by 2.9%. This effect is increasing in worker mobility: If workers were half as mobile, the firm would have decreased aggregate welfare by 6%. The model also shows that a local monopsonist compensates workers mostly through local amenities keeping wages low, and leads to higher welfare levels than a counterfactual with perfectly competitive labor markets in all regions. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I study an important question in the field of economic growth and development: How developing countries learn to adopt and use new technologies. In particular, the chapter studies how countries learn from each other through international trade. First, I build a panel of bilateral trade flows between industries in different countries. Matching this panel with data on industry-level productivity, I document how productivity grows systematically faster for countries that trade with partners with better technologies, but that this is reducing the gap between local and foreign productivity. Second, I build a model in which knowledge transfers can occur through imported technology, leading to productivity growth. In my framework, agents have heterogeneous learning abilities: The probability of a producer adopting a technology slightly better than hers is larger than the probability of adopting a much more sophisticated one--the trade-off being that conditional on adoption, more sophisticated technologies lead to higher productivity. I document how the model matches the empirical dependence of productivity growth on productivity gaps across trading partners, and the firm size distribution. The model also highlights how ignoring differences in learning abilities can overestimate the impact of exposure to high-TFP trading partners, leading to suboptimal trade policies. I conclude that developing countries should direct relatively more trade to mid-productive countries--as opposed to very productive ones--to maximize technology transfers and increase growth.

Download or read book Essays in Honor of Cheng Hsiao written by Dek Terrell and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including contributions spanning a variety of theoretical and applied topics in econometrics, this volume of Advances in Econometrics is published in honour of Cheng Hsiao.

Download or read book Essays on Economic Development and Gains from Trade written by Minho Kim and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In each of the three essays, I investigate gains from trade originating at three sources: i) vertical specialization through intermediate goods trade, ii) improving allocation of resources across heterogeneous firms, and iii) developing countries' technological advancement towards particular factors of production, either skilled labor or unskilled labor. I develop three models of trade, featuring multi-stage production, micro-distortions with endogenous entry and exit, and directed technical change. First, I show quantitatively that trade barriers play an important role in hindering the integration of poor countries in global market through trade in intermediate goods. Second, I find that the substantial impact of trade is to improve allocation on the extensive margin by forcing out less productive firms and replacing those with more productive firms. Third, I prove that gains from trade are magnified due to endogenously directed technical change. In the first chapter, I investigate whether the gains from trade are systematically related to the level of development. This chapter argues that we need to consider a multi-stage production process to answer the questions. I develop a Ricardian trade model which features two stages of production. At each stage, gains from trade can be measured by the home trade share, a measure of market integration. Looking at each stage's home trade shares across countries, I find different specialization patterns: rich countries are integrated at each stage whereas most poor countries are not integrated. Measured gains from trade are more than ten times larger for the 10 richest countries than for the 10 poorest countries. For the rich countries, two-thirds of the gains are accounted for by second stage trade. Poor countries' small gains from trade are accounted entirely by first stage trade. I argue that difference in trade barriers between rich countries and poor countries, particularly in the second stage of production, limit trade gains for poor countries. Second chapter studies the impact of international trade on sectoral total factor productivity (TFP). Misallocation of resources across heterogeneous firms impacts negatively on TFP. In this chapter, I study trade liberalization as a source of reducing misallocation across firms, thus leading to higher TFP. Misallocation is reduced on the extensive margin by forcing out less productive firms and replacing those with more productive firms. Using firm-level panel data on Chinese manufacturing, I measure distortions across firms and over time as in Hsieh and Klenow (2009). I find that the allocation of factors improves more in industries that experience a higher reduction in tariff rates. Less productive firms are more likely to exit in sectors that experience a higher tariff reduction. In addition, entrants in more liberalized sectors are more productive relative to entrants in less liberalized sectors. Reducing misallocation on the extensive margin has quantitatively large effect on TFP. In the third chapter, I analyze how technical change is directed towards particular factors of production in international trade between the North and the South. Typical assumption in the literature is that either technologies are exogenously given or technical change is allowed only in the North. I present a model of international trade with endogenous growth by allowing the South to direct their technology. This chapter studies the implications of the technical change for the gains from trade and the skill premium. Main result shows that more R & D is directed towards skill-augmenting technology in the North than in the South in sectors with the same skill-intensity. Technical change induced by lowering trade costs can increase the skill premium in both the North and the South. Gains from trade are magnified due to endogenous directed technical change. This results in larger gains from trade compared with the model where technical change is either not allowed or allowed only in the North.

Download or read book Three Essays on Heterogeneous Firms and International Trade written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mr Sraffa on Joint Production and Other Essays written by Bertram Schefold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1989-09-21 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An attempt to provide a formal analysis of joint production, the text of which was originally the author's PhD thesis. The work is designed to lead from the most abstract and general concepts of the theory of value to applications in the areas of the measurement of capital and growth, of international trade, and of natural resources.